|
Red Tails in the Sunset
By Jean Damu
23 January 2012
Red
Tails, the new
George Lucas film depicting the exploits of the
Tuskegee Airmen is to the history of black fighter
pilots during WWII what a sunset is to a day—it’s pretty
to watch but no illumination is forthcoming. However,
(and with all due respect), for those of us who wrote
their high school book reports after reading the Classic
Comic version or watched the Disney Channel version and
perhaps even more worrisome, for those of us who may be
Tyler Perry fans, then
Red
Tails, is surely a must see.
For those however
who took the time to read a book or take seriously
African American’s participation and contributions to
everyday life probably will want to take a pass.
Red
Tails is decidedly not another
Glory, the 1989 Morgan Freeman film that was
relatively accurate in its telling the story of the
Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first all black
infantry unit of the Civil War.
Red
Tails, so named because the Tuskegee airmen
painted the tails of their planes red, is a cartoonish
caricature of great fighting men who contributed much to
the world’s titanic struggle against fascism that was
WWII. But who, according to
Lucas and film writers
John
Ridley (Under
Cover Brother and Fox News contributor) and
Aaron McGruder (Boondocks),
had no personal relationships with family or black women
(not one black woman appears in the film) and who were
hopelessly criminal in their refusal to follow orders
and complete a mission as assigned.
To be fair all the
exploits attributed to the black pilots in
Red
Tails are absolutely true. Black pilots were
originally assigned to strafing duty (the most dangerous
of all air assignments) with outdated planes. They did
blow up an ammunition train. They did destroy a German
airfield and one airman was among the first allied
pilots to shoot down an ME (Messerschmitt) 262 fighter
jet.
But for purposes of
calming and soothing the qualms of
Lucas’s financial backers and film industry banks
who feared a film with a nearly all black cast would
bomb (figuratively speaking of course) at the box
office, all these exploits are depicted as being carried
out by one lone rogue pilot, a pilot so undisciplined
and uncontrollable that in real life he would have been
subjected to court martial and likely expelled from the
service.
Actually in real
life the 332nd all black fighter group was assigned to
clear the sea-lanes and provide air cover for the Allies
invasion of Sicily. In the film key members of the 332nd
abandon their mission to provide air cover and
criminally wander off to bomb a German airfield.
Progressive military leaders don’t like to stifle
self-initiative but
David Oyelowo’s role as Joe Little, rogue fighter
pilot, was beyond anything reasonable or credible. Those
kinds of stunts are far more suited to Saturday morning
television at which McGruder is quite successful.
Far in excess of
the cartoon caricatures that are the Tuskegee Airmen in
Red
Tails are the embarrassing, emasculated 332nd
squadron leading characters assigned to
Terrence Howard and
Cuba Gooding, Jr.
Gooding
is particularly annoying as an eternally pacific,
pipe-smoking mentor to his young protégé pilots. But
what he comes across as is nothing more than a
pretentious McArthur wannabe, never personally putting
himself in harms way and never taking the damn pipe out
of his mouth. Meanwhile Howard’s character, Col. A. J.
Bullard, (a nice tip of the pilot's cap to
Eugene Bullard, a black pilot who flew for the
Lafayette Esquadrille during WWI) is a thinly
disguised representation of the Tuskegee Airmen's
primary leader, Lt. Col. (later General)
Benjamin O. Davis. In
Red
Tails both Howard and
Gooding
are little more than administrative pencil pushers far
removed from any form of combat and would more
appropriately have been costumed in aprons and granny
hats rather than flight jackets.
In reality
Davis and other senior flight squadron officers all
had their own planes and fully participated in combat
missions. This was true not just in the black units but
all the white units as well. During WWII the Army Air
Corps was an OJT air force. For everyone it was an On
the Job Training because military air science was a new
field and few knew very much about it.
Importantly
Davis’s plane was named “By Request,” because after
the Red Tails became known for providing particularly
close protection for bombing raids and bomber groups
losses diminished, they were requested specifically by
the white bomber groups for protection.
As a matter of
course the actors can’t be blamed for the miserable
script that was handed them. We have to assume they did
the best they could.
Curiously the
Red
Tails episode that raised the biggest question
centered on the pilot shot down, captured by the Germans
and taken to prison camp. What followed on screen was
apparently cut and pasted from the 2002 Bruce Willis
vehicle,
Hart’s War, that featured Terrence Howard as the
downed Tuskegee man.
A far more
revealing episode could have been provided about the two
Red Tail pilots who actually were shot down over
Yugoslavia, rescued by an armed patrol of the Yugoslav
Communist Party and repatriated to the Allies on the
Italian border. But those kinds of political points are
not attractive to film writers and producers sucking up
to the banks. But
Ridley and
Lucas somewhat redeem themselves.
In an interview
with the Wall Street Journal
Ridley relates that in the run-up to actually
writing the
Red
Tails story
Lucas provided him with a van full of newspaper and
magazine articles, and military combat and personnel
records that took months to research and review.
Unfortunately very little of
Ridley’s research found its way into McGruder’s
clumsy script. However, where
Ridley’s research paid off remarkably well was in
the making of the
Red
Tails companion piece,
Double
Victory, the documentary.
Here the real and
nearly complete story of the Tuskegee airmen’s struggle
against fascism overseas and racism at home is honestly
and inspiringly told. It ranks among the very best, if
not the best documentary ever made telling the role of
black military men in WWII.
Black women’s role
as spiritual and material sustainers of the black pilots
as wives and girlfriends is fully revealed. We learn
that when the first class of Tuskegee airmen graduated
Lena
Horne attended the dance that followed and danced
with every graduating cadet. We get misty eyed when one
former Red Tail, now in his mid eighties tells us that
after the first graduation dance, he walked his
girlfriend home and asked, “Will you fly with me for the
rest of our lives?” Yes, she said.
Double
Victory, the documentary is absolutely
everything
Red
Tails is not. It’s the only redeeming aspect of
the main feature. This is the film everyone absolutely
should see.
* * *
* *
Double Victory Trailer /
About Red Tails
George Lucas: Hollywood Didn't Want To Fund—Red
Tails Because Of Its Black Cast—10 January
2012—In an appearance on The Daily Show last night,
George Lucas said that he had trouble getting funding
for his new movie,
Red
Tails, because of its black cast. "This has been
held up for release since 1942 since it was shot, I've
been trying to get released ever since," Lucas told Jon
Stewart. "It's because it's an all-black movie. There's
no major white roles in it at all...I showed it to all
of them and they said no. We don't know how to market a
movie like this."
Red
Tails, which stars
Cuba Gooding, Jr, and
Terrence Howard, is based on
the Tuskegee Airmen, the group of pioneering black
pilots who fought in the United States' segregated armed
forces during World War II. The movie is directed by
Anthony Hemingway, the rare black director getting a
chance to direct a big-budget feature.—HuffingtonPost
* * * * *
3 Women
Red
Tails Left Out—Henry Louis Gates Jr.—25
January 2012—Although African Americans had valiantly
served in the Civil War, on the frontier in the Indian
Wars, in the Spanish American War and in World War I,
white politicians and military officers still publicly
professed to doubt black ability and patriotism, as part
of the ideology and propaganda that undergirded Jim Crow
in all of its pernicious forms. The crucial change came
in 1938, primarily because of the efforts of an
African-American woman,
Mary McLeod Bethune, who saw, before most other
black leaders, a way to break the hold of racism on
black participation in the military, by striking at the
most resistant obstacle of all: the integration of the
pilot program. . . .
Bethune's struggle
to get African Americans into pilot-training programs
began in 1938 with the New Deal's
Civilian Pilot Training Program. The program was
modestly funded by the
National Youth Administration—an important point,
because Bethune headed the "Negro Section" of the NYA.
She was also the only female member of President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "black cabinet" and a
close friend of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Bethune, a famed
educator and head of the
National Council of Negro Women, proved a relentless
advocate for black equality and lobbied President
Roosevelt to resist the demands of the Southern wing of
the Democratic Party, which was hell-bent on maintaining
segregation, especially in the military. Since the
program's goal was to train 20,000 college students a
year as civilian pilots, the key to integrating the
U.S. Army's Air Corps during the coming war, Bethune
realized, was getting the government to open training
programs on the campuses of historically black colleges
and universities.
With extraordinary
foresight, she used her considerable authority to get
Tuskegee Institute, Hampton Institute, Virginia State,
North Carolina A&T, Delaware State, West Virginia State
and Howard University included among the colleges and
universities chosen as sites for pilot training. Without
this crucial intervention, there would have been no
Tuskegee Airmen.
Beginning in 1939, Bethune
advised the president that among all the
disabilities black Americans suffered:
|
One of the sorest points
among Negroes which I have encountered is
the flagrant discrimination against Negroes
in all the armed forces of the United
States. Forthright action on your part to
lessen discrimination and segregation and
particularly in affording opportunities for
the training of Negro pilots for the air
corps would gain tremendous good will,
perhaps even out of proportion to the
significance of such action. |
West Virginia State College became the first black
school to establish an aviation program, and because of
Bethune's efforts, it received its first military
airplane in 1939. It set a precedent that soon
benefited the Tuskegee Institute, which received its
authorization in October of that year.
The Tuskegee Airmen
also owed a debt to
Willa
Beatrice Brown, one of two women in the all-black
Challenger Air Pilots Association, founded in 1935.
Brown was one of about 100 licensed black pilots in the
entire country. She also became the first
African-American woman to receive a commission as a
lieutenant in the
U.S. Civil Air Patrol.
An expert in
business administration and public relations and a
dedicated aviator, Brown played a critical role in
promoting the image of black aviators to help fight
racial prejudice and expand opportunities for all
blacks. She became chair of the association's education
committee and appeared in the offices of the
Chicago Defender, the famed black paper of the
era, to convince the paper to cover the association's
air shows.
Enoch Waters [author of
American Diary], one of the paper's editors,
visited an air show and became so impressed with the
talent he saw that the
Defender became a sponsor of the association.
The paper, because of Brown's appeal, also began
covering all aspects of black aviation, and soon other
black papers followed suit, especially the influential
Pittsburgh Courier.
Because several
American black aviators had gone to fight the Italian
fascists in Ethiopia in 1935, national interest in black
pilots had increased. Brown exploited the growing fame
of black pilots and helped organize Chicago's
National Airmen's Association of America in 1937,
which chartered branches across the country (except in
the Deep South). Without Brown's work, African-American
interest in aviation could have languished.
 |
Additionally, she
not only successfully lobbied for federal
funds to support the private
Coffey School of Aviation in Chicago but
also wrote directly to
Eleanor Roosevelt in December
1941.Brown's role in the integration of
America's aviation forces, like that of
Bethune, was a considerable one as well. In
1941
Eleanor Roosevelt, at Bethune's urging,
convinced the
Rosenwald Fund (which had a long history
of supporting various kinds of projects
aimed at ameliorating American race
relations, and on whose board she served) to
help expand the pilot-training program at
Tuskegee. And then in March of that year,
Roosevelt not only visited the
Tuskegee Institute's Moton Airfield but,
incredibly, also asked the chief flight
instructor,
Charles A. "Chief" Anderson, to take her
on a flight, against the adamant objections
of the Secret Service.
This is quite likely the
first time a black man flew a plane with a
white woman as his passenger. Roosevelt
spent over an hour in the skies above
Tuskegee. She returned to Washington and
lobbied her husband to integrate America's
aviation forces. According to the FDR
Presidential Library and Museum, she
declared that all the statements she had
heard that blacks couldn't fly planes were
bunkum. |
The rest is
history: The 99th Pursuit Squadron (later called the
99th Fighter Squadron) was formed in July 1941. The
first class of black aviator cadets began to train on
Nov. 8, 1941, with the first pilots graduating on March
7, 1942. In all, 992 African-American pilots trained at
Tuskegee Army Air Field, and 450 of its black pilots
flew in combat during the war, serving in the four black
fighter squadrons and four bomber groups.
By June 1944, black
pilots had flown 500 missions in the 99th Fighter
Squadron, first in North Africa and later in Sicily and
the rest of Italy. The
332nd Fighter Group flew 179 heavy bomber-escort
missions, as
Red
Tails depicts so effectively, shielding heavy
bombers such as the B-24 Liberator. They shot down 111
Axis aircraft.
In their longest
escort mission, the
332nd Fighter Group managed to shoot down not one,
but
three of the new ME-262 jet fighters that the
Germans threw against the propeller-driven fighter
planes—again, in a battle that Lucas so vividly
re-creates. Sixty-six of the Tuskegee Airmen died during
the war, and others earned many Purple Hearts, Silver
Stars and Distinguished Flying Crosses.
President Harry S. Truman even gave the Tuskegee
Airmen a Distinguished Unit Citation for "outstanding
performance and extraordinary heroism."
When black
activists urged Truman to desegregate the military in
1948, they could point to the heroism of the Red Tails
pilots to prove that black servicemen had earned the
equal treatment that they deserved as loyal Americans.
But without the bold imagination of Mary McLeod Bethune,
the persistent advocacy of Willa Beatrice Brown and the
sheer stubbornness of her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, it
is doubtful that Tuskegee Airmen would have come into
being.—TheRoot
* * *
* *
|
The Tuskegee Airmen
John Lithgow (Actor), Cuba Jr. Gooding
This true story of the black flyers who
broke the color barrier in the U.S. Air
Force during World War II is a
well-intentioned film highlighted by an
excellent cast. Proud, solemn, Iowa-born
Laurence Fishburne and city-kid hipster
Cuba Gooding Jr. are among the hopefuls
who meet en route to Tuskegee Air Force
Base, where they are among the recruits
for an "experimental" program to "prove"
the abilities of the black man in the
U.S. armed services. Fighting prejudice
from racist officers and government
officials and held to a consistently
higher level of performance than their
white counterparts, these men prove
themselves in training and in combat,
many of them dying for their country in
the process. Andre Braugher costars as a
West Point graduate who takes charge of
the unit in Africa and in Italy (where
it's christened the 332nd). The film is
rousing, if slow starting and episodic,
but it's periodically grounded by a host
of war movie clichés, notably the
calculated demise of practically every
trainee introduced in the opening scenes
(ironic given the 332nd's real-life
combat record--high casualties for the
enemy, low casualties among themselves,
and no losses among the bombers they
escorted). Ultimately the Emmy-nominated
performances by moral backbone Fishburne
and the dedicated Braugher and the
energy and cocky confidence of Gooding
give their battles both on and off the
battlefield the sweet taste of victory.—Sean
Axmaker |
 |
* * *
* *
Oscar nominations 2012: full list
 |
Juano Hernández (July 19, 1896 – July 17, 1970) was a Puerto Rican stage and film actor of African descent who was a pioneer in the African-American film industry. He made his debut in an Oscar Micheaux film, The Girl from Chicago which was directed at black audiences. Hernández also performed in a serious of dramatic roles in mainstream Hollywood movies. His participation in the film "Intruder in the Dust" earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination for "New Star of the Year." . . . In 1949, he acted in his first mainstream film, based on William Faulkner's novel, Intruder in the Dust, in which he played the role of "Lucas Beauchamp", a poor Southern sharecropper unjustly accused of murder. The film earned him a Golden Globe nomination for "New Star of the Year." The film was listed as one of the ten best of the year by the New York Times. Faulkner said of the film: "I'm not much of a moviegoer, but I did see that one. I thought it was a fine job. That Juano Hernandez is a fine actor—and man, too." Film historian Donald Bogle said that
Intruder in the Dust broke new ground in the cinematic portrayal of blacks, and Hernandez's "performance and extraordinary presence still rank above that of almost any other black actor to appear in an American movie."—Wikipedia |
* * *
* *
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
|
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
posted 27 January 2012
|
